No Islamic jurist anticipated voluntary Muslim emigration to non-Muslim lands
Evidence
It was not until the early nineteenth century that the Pasha of Egypt, followed by the Sultan of Turkey and the Shah of Persia, sent the ļ¬rst student missions to Europe. Their main purĀ pose in sending these missions was the modernization of their armed forces, and their action could therefore be justiļ¬ed by the ruling of earlier jurists that it is perĀ missible to learn from the enemy in order more effectively to ļ¬ght him. ā¦ The one contingency that never seems to have occurred to any of those enĀ gaged in these discussions was that Muslims, singly or in groups, might chose of their own free will to leave the lands of Islam and to go and settle in a non- Muslim country. ā Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 704
The one contingency that never seems to have occurred to any of those enĀ gaged in these discussions was that Muslims, singly or in groups, might chose of their own free will to leave the lands of Islam and to go and settle in a non- Muslim country. ā Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 704
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The complete failure of a centuries-long legal-theological tradition to imagine voluntary Muslim emigration reshapes how we read modern European Muslim communities ā the category literally did not exist, and post-imperial migration hit a jurisprudence with no apparatus for it. This is a paradigm-shifting frame for understanding contemporary debates.
- XREF: Echoes my reading on how legal traditions construct social reality ā like the law merchant institutions, a legal frame creates categories that then shape what actions are conceivable.
- SEED: Article angle: how legal imagination fails to anticipate demographic reality ā the jurisprudence that had no category for permanent Muslim presence in Europe, and the consequences of that absence today.
- QUESTION: This juridical blind spot ā a gap in the Islamic legal tradition comparable to nothing on the Christian side ā is exactly the sort of asymmetry worth chasing for the representation cluster.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim ā Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpretingā¦, 704